The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘accomplishments’

Let the trumpets sound and the games begin. It’s not the Oscars or the Olympics, but it is the commencement of the 3rd annual Crunchies Awards that we’re pleased to co-host with GigaOm and VentureBeat (click for their coverage today).

Yes, this is the time of year that we stop bickering among ourselves as bloggers, and come together to honor the startups, products and entrepreneurs who make our lives so much fun.

The Crunchies Awards celebrate the best technology accomplishments of 2009. There are 18 award categories to recognize accomplishments across a variety of fields and roles. And to keep things fresh, we have a few new award categories this year too. Our focus is start-ups, but big companies and products can be winners too.

Starting today, nominate your favorite companies, products and people for consideration in 18 different award categories. Self nominations are welcome. Grab a badge here and get your community to support you for finalist consideration. Nominations are open through midnight pst December 4, 2009 .

The Crunchies Committee will choose five finalists per award category based on the submitted nominations and the company accomplishments made during 2009. Popular voting will open on Monday, December 21 and run through midnight pst, Wednesday January 6, 2010. The full rules are here. You can vote up to once per day in each category.

The Crunchies Awards will be held live Friday January 8, 2010 at 7:30 pm the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. We promise a memorable evening with the community to celebrate our accomplishments of 2009 and look forward to a bright 2010.

Who were some of our winners from 2008?

Facebook won the Crunchie for Best StartUp of 2008.

Friendfeed won the Crunchie for Best New StartUp of 2008.

Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone from Twitter won the Crunchie for Best Founder(s). Pictured here with award benefactor, CRV’s George Zachary.

The full list of finalists and winners from 2008 is here. 2007 is here.

Expect another great after-party to follow in City Hall’s grand Rotunda through midnight with lots more fun and games. As always, sponsors great and small make our events possible, so contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde if you want to participate in the awards ceremony or after-party festivities. If your press, please contact Daniel Brusilovsky for credentials.

Make someone’s year. Nominate a company for a Crunchie today.

Photo credits: Marc Salsberry

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Electronic Arts has brought its very popular Spore franchise to Facebook, with the launch of a new game called Spore Islands. The game, while thematically similar to the well known PC game that was released last year, has gameplay that’s entirely different. Rather than roaming around a 3D world, Spore for Facebook is more of a stategy game: you tweak your creature and then watch how it fares against the other beasts inhabiting your island.

I took the game for a spin last night and found it to be pretty fun, though there’s a bit of a learning curve. The game is effectively broken down into two main sections: the creature builder, where you can tweak both the appearance and the attributes of your character (things like speed, reproductive rate, and over a dozen others). Once you’ve fine tuned your creature to your satisfaction, you can go into ‘observation’ mode, where you watch miniature versions of the island’s animals fight over food, eat each other, and reproduce (by way of eggs hatching). The graphics in the simulation portion are pretty basic — everything is presented in a 2D, top-down view, but they’re charming and get the job done.

The game’s strategy lies in crafting the ideal creature that’s best suited to both your island’s enviroment (which can be impacted by the type of food available) and the other creatures living on the island with you (if you’re slow and another create is quicker to get to the food available, you’ll probably die of starvation). This can be harder than it sounds, because when you’re playing against your friends the variables will be constantly changing, as the game allows you to further tweak your creature’s attributes between rounds using DNA points, the game’s virtual currency.

As with most Facebook games, Spore includes a number of viral mechanisms that invite you to publish your accomplishments to your news feed and to invite friends to come play with you (the biggest draw will be the buttons to invite friends to join you on your island). To monetize, the game allows users to purchase extra DNA points for further customizing their creatures.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

I think congratulations are in order! The official Robot Hall of Fame is inducting several new members into its illustrious ranks.

The rest is here: 
Mars Rovers, Roomba and the Terminator enter the Robot Hall of Fame

Here it is, folks, at long last. Its been over a month and a half since details of Facebook v1.5 for BlackBerry spilled all over the place , but it’s now available for anyone and everyone with a compatible ‘Berry. Read the rest of this entry > >

Go here to see the original: 
Facebook for BlackBerry v1.5 now available

After we snagged some info on the video capabilities of the new Sidekick LX yesterday we couldn’t help but ask for more info. And we sure got it.

The rest is here: 
Sample footage from the T-Mobile 3G Sidekick LX